"Likely the most widely read living poet in Ireland", The Stinging Fly magazine.
If you wish to invite Kevin to give a poetry reading, do a talk or facilitate a writing workshop email kphiggins@hotmail.com or phone 087-6431748.

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Sunday, 18 May 2014

Mick Wallace's speech at Cúirt Festival launch of 'The Ghost in the Lobby'

Myself, Mick Wallace and Aengus McCanna, a participant in
my creative writing class at Galway Technical Institute, at the Galway
launch of The Ghost in the Lobby which took place as part of this year's Cúirt Festival of International Literature. I am holding a signed copy of Alan Shatter's novel Laura which was presented to me on the day by James Martyn Joyce.

Speech
by Mick Wallace TD at launch of Kevin Higgins’s The Ghost in the Lobby at the Cúirt Festival of International
Literature, Galway Arts Centre, Sunday, April 13th, 2014: First
of all, I don’t know much about poetry, I know a lot more about football,
coaching young fellas and building houses, apartments and roads. I was
surprised that Kevin asked me to launch the book. The first time I was talking
to him, since he asked me, was yesterday. I think he’s probably wondering
himself why he asked me. He did warn me, as well, that I wasn’t to talk too
much. So that kind of made me wonder again why he asked me; maybe he realises
that at heart I’m a selfish egocentric bastard and that I’m probably going to
talk much more about myself than I am about him and his poetry. Which is true.
Because I don’t know much about Kevin and I know a little bit about me. So, I
started reading these poems yesterday and I thought it was very interesting; I
thought it was about time to read them, before I got here.

Honestly, when you read poems, you
find different things in them, everyone will find something that appeals to
them particularly. So I picked out a few quotes and marked a few lines that
stimulated some thoughts for me. The first line that I liked was “I leave the house / just as the rain’s begun
taking itself / far too seriously”. I liked that. The ‘Dear Editor’ poem is
very interesting for someone that works in the field, if you can call it work,
that I do now: “Dear Editor, is it just
me? / You are what I do nights / when I can’t phone radio stations / to
violently disagree with what I said last week.” And it finishes with “only when you say my name / can I be sure I
still exist.” The struggle for recognition is a strange thing for all of
us. It’s particularly strange when you see politicians operate. Because it’s
been disappointing most of the time, what they do. For the three years that
I’ve been in the Dáil, you’d be kind of shocked at the kind of effort that guys
put in to getting on television and the radio and getting their picture in the
paper - I’ve spent three years trying to stay out of the papers – they haven’t
succeeded and neither have I. I find it very strange, but this poem actually
captured it a bit, it’s almost as if we don’t exist unless we’re getting
recognition. Okay, we all like a bit of recognition but getting it from the
media doesn’t do much for me at the moment. Never has. I find them a pretty
abysmal lot.

Speaking of the Dáil, I see a poem
here – and I’m sure Kevin wouldn’t admit to it – but I think I know who he’s
talking about. He says: “Your straight
face / all the years you rhymed attack with Iraq / your love of alliteration /
that’s had you repeating / billionaire bondholders each day / for the past
thousand and counting.” I’d probably be in trouble if I named him, but I
think I know who it is. It reminds me of the particular individual involved,
when I got into some bit of hot water about the V.A.T. One of the first things
when I went into the Dáil that I found hard to take was listening to the
government ministers talking about stuff they know nothing about, because they
had no experience of life, listening to them talking about creating jobs, about
changing building regulations, about housing and construction and the whole lot.
I discovered that most of them had never actually lived in the real world. It’s
part of the reason why there is such a disconnect between what happens in the
Dáil and what happens in the world outside, that there’s so little experience
actually in the place. It’s made up mostly of legals, publicans and teachers. I
find it amazing that there’s no civil engineers, or engineers of any type, in
the Dáil. Engineering – the artists mightn’t agree with
me so much on this, but I do think it encourages clear thinking. And clear
thinking is seriously lacking in the Dáil chamber.

Anyway, as hard as it is
listening to the Right side of politics lecturing you about something they know
nothing about, when I did run into trouble on the V.A.T., I was getting some
serious lectures from the hard Left, so called, about how I should have ran my
business. Given that I had employed thousands of people, I was finding it a bit
difficult to take from guys who had never employed anyone. And most of them had
never done a day’s manual work in their life. It isn’t easy to list you someone
lecturing you about something they know nothing about, and that’s why I don’t
intend to lecture you about poetry. Because you know more about it, than I do.

In here there’s a poem called ‘Go’ “Where you can be sure the mincemeat /
contains no percent mule”. Now, I like that. And it reminds me of the
serious cover up that we did about the horse meat, because we didn’t really
come clean on that. But we’re not very good at coming clean with this kind of
stuff. I still remember when Larry Goodman was making a fortune putting
concrete blocks in cardboard boxes and getting paid subsidies on it. And instead
of throwing him in jail, AIB wiped his debts and he was flying around in the
helicopter again the next week.

A poem like ‘Alternative Proposals
shows Kevin has obviously kept his eye on what’s going on in the Dáil– Clare
Daly and myself put a fair bit of work into the whole abortion debate; we were
just talking about it last week. Now that Minister Shatter has got two nasty
letters in the post, it reminded us that we stopped counting what we were
getting when it went past the thousand mark from – don’t want to call them any
bad names – the ‘pro-life’ lobby. But anyway, this is a very good poem which I
like very much and I’ll just read you a piece of it: “Any woman of childbearing hips / unfortunate enough to find herself
alive / on the patch of weeds between Muff /and Kilmuckbridge or Skibbereen / and
Hackballs Cross must / to have her baby/babies legally / abhorted obtain,
before she kills herself, / without bribery, or offer of sexual favours / the
signatures of six former members of the Irish National Liberation Army / six
personal friends of Shane Ross” – now, you’re asking a bit much there – “six random guys shouting obscenities in the
street, / six women from Barna / who though Michael D’s speech last week to the
European Parliament / was absolutely marvellous / six plumbers who’ll
definitely be there / first thing Tuesday morning.” It’s actually
interesting that you said “Tuesday” because during the good times the plumbers
stopped working on Monday. A lot of building workers stopped going to work on
Mondays because they couldn’t spend all the money before Sunday.

Now, being that I’ve already
admitted that I’m a serious selfish bastard, there’s a poem about me in here.
I’ve read this before. It came at a time when I was getting more attention than
I wanted; it was also around my V.A.T. problems: “Anatomy of
a Public Outcry.

Those with short
uncommented upon hairbut exquisite
tax returns

can’t forgive
you beingregularly
mistaken for Jesus" Thanks!

“Or the lead singer in Poison.” Thanks
again.

“The ninety eight caller

to Four FM’s Hour
of Complaintwants you
publicly garrottedin, preferably,
New Ross”. Listen,
I don’t want to die in New Ross! New Ross is not a great part to die in.

“for allegedly eating risottoat inappropriate
hours of the day" I
have to admit I have eaten risotto at all kinds of hours of the day.

“The little guy once caughthaving a
wardrobe malfunctionwith a tender
and mercifulrent boy" I
know who he is too.

“The Times and Daily Mail agreewhen the Irish
team concedethat third
shattering goal,or it rains in
Mayofor the fourth
consecutive day,it’ll officially
beall your fault."

Now,
‘Newly Elected Face Makes Maiden Speech’, this is interesting as well: “I have nothing against homosexuals,but am not in
favour of them either.Now you’ve told
me Ché Guevarawas a Communist
and Adolf Eichmanna very bad man,
I’ll bear those factsin mind, when
talking about septic tanks,a subject on
which I’ve loads to contribute.I’m against
nuclear war and the SpanishInquisition,
except when they actually happen."

The
Dáil is so full of people who, really, don’t have an opinion. And, if they
have, they keep it to themselves in case they lose votes by expressing it. That
poem is very apt.

There’s a poem here called ‘Prayer
for a Friend’, which is about a friend of Kevin’s called Clare Daly who, as
papers have told you, she’s also a friend of mine. It’s a poem about an
encounter they had many years ago, but he drags it into the present day as
well: “Today is / you still sitting in
front of armoured cars / others aren’t big enough to resist. / All you wanted
come true, so / don’t be the girl who died / of her name on the front pages
beside // the worst picture they could find.” That is very, very good.
Myself and Clare and Ming, I would like to think, we have tried to be different
and we haven’t played games. We don’t find many people in there who don’t play
games. The media don’t like us very much for that. The mainstream media really
only give us coverage when they have something nasty to say about us. This poem
captures that, because, really, we were supposed to disappear when they burst
the living daylights out of us.

Myself, I got the front page of the Irish
Independent nineteen times during the summer of 2012. And none of it was very
positive. We were supposed to go quietly, like some have done, when the
pressure comes on. But we didn’t have an appetite for disappearing but an
appetite for speaking our minds and, I suppose, trying to articulate a voice
who don’t have one in the Dáil chamber. Our appetite for that has grown
stronger and a lot of people don’t like that very much. I don’t know how much
you have noticed but challenging the establishment in this country is not so
easy. They’re very powerful and they have a lot of vested interests in keeping
the likes of us silent. But, until they shoot us, we won’t be silent.I better keep my promise not to go
on too long. But it’s always nice to air your views and have your say. It’s the
part of the Dáil that I like the best, where you can say what you like. And I
do that more and more. I speak six or eight times a week on average. The nicest
correspondence I have is people from all around the country writing to me, also
saying good things not just bad things. A lot of people have written to me and
said it was wonderful that I spoke for them when I spoke on a particular day.
It does encourage me to keep going.

On the side of poetry, I still
remember a poem that I liked very much when I was a kid. I think of it a lot.
Because there’s some lines in it that matter a lot to me. It’s a poem by Robert
Frost. It’s ‘Stopping By Woods On A
Snowy Evening’. And it goes something like

“Whose woods these are I think I
know.His house is in the village
though;He will not see me stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with
snow.

My little horse must find it
queerTo stop without a farmhouse near…"

God
that’s terrible, now, to forget like this...

“…Between the woods and frozen
lakeThe darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a
shakeTo ask if there is some mistake.The only other sound’s the sweepOf easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep."